


on without end

by harpers_mirror (SapphireBryony)



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Christmas Fluff, Gen, Secret Santa Summer Hell 2016, can be read as shippy or not depending on your preference
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-30
Updated: 2016-08-30
Packaged: 2018-08-12 01:55:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7915939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SapphireBryony/pseuds/harpers_mirror
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>I wrenched open the hatch to the arms locker, gun drawn.</i> Lull me into a false sense of security, huh? Pretend to be my friend so you could stab me in the -</p><p>
  <i>Eiffel was asleep in the corner of the little room, amid a floating tangle of colorful streamers.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	on without end

**Author's Note:**

> Now with [amazing and adorable illustrations!](http://happyfunballxd.tumblr.com/post/154310308433/so-for-the-wolf-359-secret-santa-i-got-the)

The blaring buzz of another alarm jolted me awake, sounding like nothing so much as a giant dentist’s drill. Blearily, I shoved my hair out of my eyes and headed for the hatch, recognizing the sound as the one that signified yet more trouble with the pressurization in the hangar bay.

Three days since the mutiny. Hundreds of systems on the ship that could decide to break down. And yet Eiffel and I already knew every sound as well as we knew our own names - in fact, it had become something of a game the second night. Punch-drunk with exhaustion and giddy with adrenaline, we’d started competing to see who could identify which system was - as Eiffel put it - going kablooey.

He’d dubbed the game “Name That Disaster!”

Neither of us had laughed after he said it.

Making my way to the hangar bay, I was somewhat surprised to see Eiffel already there. Where the heck had he come from? Our quarters were on the other side of the ship.

But there were currently bigger concerns, namely the rather alarming lack of air in the room. Ever since the great bridge venting of Friday morning, we’d taken to carrying oxygen masks on our persons at all times - better safe than asphyxiated, as Pryce & Carter reminds us, after all.

Eiffel shot me a small smile as I made my way over to the panel before turning his whole attention on the controls. I had to admit, I was legitimately impressed with the way he’d handled things since Hilbert... since Christmas. I wasn’t entirely sure where this focused, serious Eiffel had come from, but I was _not_ complaining - there was no way I could have done this all myself. Hell, the two of us were barely scraping by as it was.

Scrape by we did though. The alarm was soon silenced as the room stabilized and the pair of us fell back against the wall, heaving a sigh in near-perfect unison.

Eiffel glanced over at me. God he looked worn down.

“How ya holding up, Commander?”

I shrugged, looking away. “I’m fine, Eiffel. I have to be. What other choice do I have?”

When he pushed off the wall in silence, it caught me off-guard. Even under these dire circumstances, part of me still expected that everything I said to him would be met with a joke, a deflection, an incomprehensible pop-culture word salad.

I missed it. And that was, frankly, kind of appalling. To cover my consternation, I asked him where he was headed.

“Just going back to my quarters, Commander. Gonna try to grab a little rack time while I can, y’know?” He scampered off - in the opposite direction of the crew quarters.

I started to call after him but stopped, too tired and dispirited to care. Normally, Eiffel sneaking around the ship and lying about his intentions would be cause for serious alarm. Normally, I’d assume he was up to something that would probably kill us all and try to track him down and stop him.

But nothing had been normal for days at this point and honestly, it wasn’t like he could cause much trouble the station wasn’t already causing on its own. Wearily, I let the matter drop and strapped in to catch what little sleep I could.

Which turned out to be about 25 minutes worth, before the number three engine started to catch on fire and things got a little frantic for a few minutes. Once again, my dazed brain noticed, Eiffel was there before me and once again, he left in a direction that made no sense.

It was starting to irritate me, my fuse having grown pretty short over the last three days. And in the haze of dozing and waking and quelling fires and questioning every last decision I made, everything started to blur together, until Eiffel never seemed to be in the same place twice, appearing from all directions and disappearing to others and then he disappeared one final time and never reappeared.

“Fine, I’ll deal with these sparking circuits by myself then, shall I? Not like you’d be any help if you were here anyway,” I growled, wincing as a particularly temperamental wire zapped my finger. “Useless, lazy...”

The panel burst into flames and something snapped in me. Grabbing the fire extinguisher, I snarled, “Probably try to put this out with water or something. Never mind it would get us all killed! _You_ wouldn’t care, you’d just stare at me waiting to be told what to do, because you just think _I_ have _all_ the answers, don’t you? Haven’t figured out the truth yet? God, you _are an idiot!”_

The fire died, smothered under the choking clouds of carbon dioxide and I realized I was screaming, my voice echoing off the metal walls. Under normal circumstances, I would have been embarrassed but at this point, why should I even care? Hilbert was crazy. Hera was gone. Who knew where the fuck Eiffel was.

Throwing the extinguisher off to one side, I buried my face in my hands and allowed the brimming tears to bubble up in front of my eyes. But instead of the expected cathartic release, crying only served to make my head feel even achier and my brain more clouded. Dashing the tears from my face, I smoothed my hair out of my eyes and stalked off to find my idiot second-in-command.

He wasn’t in the comms room. He wasn’t in his quarters or mine. He wasn’t on the bridge, in engineering, or in the dining hall and I was starting to feel a sinking dread in the pit of my stomach. Where the hell was he?

My mind was racing. Was he in the observation deck, colluding with Hilbert? Had they been working together this entire time? Maybe even now he was sabotaging the engines or pulling out more wiring or setting all the airlocks in the ship to blow. Changing course, panicked and mind racing, I headed for the armory.

Trying to double-cross me, huh?

I wrenched open the hatch to the arms locker, gun drawn.

Lull me into a false sense of security? Pretend to be my friend so you could stab me in the -

Eiffel was asleep in the corner of the little room, amid a floating tangle of colorful streamers. A crooked banner hung overhead with the words “Merry Christmas” painted on it in splotchy green letters. One of the portable refrigerated food storage boxes bobbed in the opposite corner, next to a patch of wall on which had been drawn a Christmas tree, decorated with tiny LEDs and cut-out paper stars.

As I hung there in the doorway taking all this in, Eiffel stirred slightly, then startled awake.

“Commander!” he exclaimed, maneuvering himself upright, a move that mostly served to further entangle him in his nest of floating paper chains. “Crap. You weren’t supposed to see this until it was all done, that’s why I set it up in here. Guess I fell asleep. Sorry.”

I pushed myself fully into the room, closing the hatch behind me. “Eiffel...” I trailed off, still overwhelmed and more than a little confused. “What...what is all this?”

Eiffel draped one of his paper chains over the exposed metal struts holding up the racks of weapons. “It’s...” He sighed, tossing a second chain over the other end of the rack. “It’s the Christmas party you tried to give us. I know it was important to you, and I felt bad that your plans got ruined by all the un-festive mayhem. I mean, attempted murder is definitely par for the course for _some_ families’ holiday parties, but...” He shrugged, carefully avoiding my gaze. “You deserved better. So I did what I could.”

I felt tears prickling at my eyes again, and swallowed hard past the sudden lump in my throat. “Eiffel... When did you do all of this? _How_ did you do all of this?” Examining one of the cut-out paper stars, I glanced at him, horrified. “You - _these are pages from Pryce & Carter you jerk!” _

“It was a spare copy I found stuffed behind the comms panel, I swear! Not yours! Not even _mine!_ But it was that or the manual of “seven nifty tricks to make your engine stop exploding - the third one will surprise you!” and that seemed more important to have around, so I -

Eiffel stopped rambling, finally looking at me. “Are you - are you _laughing?”_

I couldn’t hold it in any longer and cracked up. Amid the gasping whoops of laughter, the tears that had threatened spilled down my cheeks, adding to the emotional chaos. Eiffel, for his part, looked mildly terrified for his safety but laughed weakly.

“So... I take it you _aren’t_ going to kill me then?” he asked, sounding slightly bemused.

I wiped my streaming eyes and caught my breath. “No, you idiot. I’m not going to kill you. I’m just...” I gestured helplessly around me at the adorably haphazard holiday celebration strewn around me. “Amazed at your endless ingenuity for the most bizarre of things. Honestly, if you applied half the creative thinking and problem solving to your everyday work that you do to your ridiculous schemes, you’d be the world’s most effective human being.”

He smiled tentatively at me. “I _think_ there was a compliment in there somewhere? Thank you?”

“Don’t get used to it,” I muttered, smiling back at him.

“Wouldn’t dream of it. Hang on a second though, Commander. You haven’t seen the half of it.” Making his way over to the “tree,” he hit a small button taped to the wall. The LEDs blinked to life, a mish-mash of various colors and blink patterns. He fished a remote control out of his jumpsuit pocket and pressed a sequence into it. A scratchy old recording of “Carol of the Bells” rang out from the speakers near the ceiling.

“It came through from our orchestral alien buddies a few days back. I record all of the transmissions that we receive so it wasn’t hard to pull this back up.”

I looked around the room, taking it all in and feeling intensely ashamed of my earlier suspicions and anger towards him.

“Eiffel... thank you for all of this. You really didn’t have to do all this. I know how you feel about Christmas.”

“Yeah, well,” he said, looking away again, his ears flushing a dull red. “I like you more than I dislike stupid holiday celebrations, so, there you go.”

Impulsively, I pulled him in for a hug. He stiffened at first, obviously surprised, but then relaxed into my hold. We floated there, embracing as the music played and the lights blinked and for one long, peaceful moment, all was right with the world.

An alarm blared to life, shattering the calm, and we hastily pulled apart. 

Eiffel sighed ruefully. “‘Gaily they ring,’ huh Commander? Sounds like the hangar bay again. Hey, once we get this disaster taken care of, I managed to salvage the last of the real turkey. It’s in the box by the tree with the rest of our Christmas dinner. We didn’t have anything for mashed potatoes, but I had a totally-not-contraband can of Pringles in my quarters, so I threw those in, along with some Twinkies in lieu of pie. And I know people usually have cranberry sauce with turkey, but the nearest cranberry bog is a few light years out - as is the nearest Giant Eagle - so we’ll have to make do with apple sauce in squeezy packs, but...”

He bounced out into the hallway ahead of me, a swirl of endless chatter in his wake but I paused for just a second, looking back at the brightly decorated little room, our happy refuge away from the chaos and the terror and the exhaustion of the past few days. Just like the Solstice celebrations of old, we were doing our best to push back the uncertainty of the darkness with a little spark of joy and light.

I followed Eiffel down the hall toward the hangar bay - he was right about the alarm, another round of “Name That Disaster” in his favor. I’d have to remember to update the score sheet once everything was nominal again. Maybe, I considered as I grabbed an oxygen mask and a sledge hammer, over some turkey and Pringles, in the light of a two-dimensional Christmas tree.

 

_Hark how the bells, sweet silver bells, all seem to say ‘throw cares away...’_

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [sealedwithacurse](http://sealedwithacurse.tumblr.com) who requested Minffel. Decided to go with a Christmas-y theme in the spirit of our summer Secret Santa. 
> 
> (The title and Doug's quoted line towards the end, as well as the final epigraph are lyrics to "Carol of the Bells" in case that wasn't clear.)
> 
> ((That copy of P&C was Lambert's and his ghost is _pissed,_ let me tell you.))


End file.
